Singapore Noir

Singapore Noir

For Cynthia Wong Mee Tin,

who taught me to love a good noir story

Introduction The Sultry City-State

Say Singapore to anyone and you’ll likely hear one of a few words: Caning. Fines. Chewing gum.

For much of the West, the narrative of Singapore — a modern Southeast Asian city-state perched on an island on the tip of the Malay Peninsula — has been marked largely by its government’s strict laws and unwavering enforcement of them.

In 1994, American teenager Michael Fay was famously sentenced to six strokes of the cane after a series of car vandalisms in Singapore. Just the year before in a cover story for Wired magazine, William Gibson criticized the country, calling it constrained and humorless, saying “conformity here is the prime directive.”

“Imagine an Asian version of Zurich operating as an offshore capsule at the foot of Malaysia,” Gibson wrote, “an affluent microcosm whose citizens inhabit something that feels like, well, Disneyland. Disneyland with the death penalty.”

As much as I understand these outside viewpoints, I have always lamented that the quirky and dark complexities of my native country’s culture rarely seem to make it past its borders. The Singapore in which I was born and spent most of my first eighteen years was safe, yes — so safe that I could wander its city streets without fear at two in the morning as a teenage girl. And its general cleanliness is unrivaled — even now, I feel sometimes that one could, in fact, eat off the streets.

Beneath that sparkling veneer, however, is a country teeming with shadows. For starters, it has not just one but several red-light districts. There’s the large designated area, Geylang, which is filled with dozens of narrow lanes and alleys where one can find prewar houses festooned with red lights and prostitutes pacing along blocks, clustered almost as you would find them in a department store — older Indian girls on this end, mainland Chinese sirens a few alleys over, and so forth.

And beyond Geylang, there are neighborhoods where one knows to go for Thai, Vietnamese, Filipina, and other girls. (Paul Theroux, in fact, set his 1973 novel Saint Jack amid the bordellos and triads of Singapore — a tale turned into a 1979 film directed by Peter Bogdanovich, which was banned in Singapore for its unsavory content.)

Gambling and its many fallouts have always been an issue in this country, one that was pockmarked with illegal gambling dens long before Las Vegas Sands poured about $6.5 billion into building a casino in the heart of Singapore in 2011.

And then there are the ghosts. Singaporeans love nothing better than to tell a good gory tale. And there are many. When I was a child, each time we passed a particular church along Orchard Road, Singapore’s main shopping street, someone would always whisper: “Curry.” In 1987, police arrested a woman and her three brothers, charging them with killing her husband, chopping him up, and turning his remains into curry, skull and all, in the church caretaker’s kitchen. While the charges were later dropped due to insufficient evidence, the story remains widely enjoyed. (Though no one I know has dared to have Sunday supper at that church since.)

It could be said that of course noir is alive in a country built on the shoulders of entrepreneurs and rebels. My father likes to note that many of the ethnic Chinese in Singapore are descendents of fortune-seekers from the coast of Southeastern China, an area known, according to him, for “smugglers, pirates, and really good businessmen.”

Singapore began humbly, as a knot of tropical Malay fishing villages located near the equator. Its name comes from Sang Nila Utama, a Sumatran prince who called it Singapura — lion city in Sanskrit — after spotting a frightening beast on its shores while hunting which his men told him was a lion. He officially founded Singapore in 1324, believing the lion sighting to be a good omen.

But it was only in 1819 that the island truly started growing — British statesman Sir Stamford Raffles sailed to its shores and established a military post and trading port there. Traders from India, China, and all over Southeast Asia began arriving, then settling. The country gained its independence in 1965 with Lee Kuan Yew, the founder of modern Singapore, serving as its prime minister until 1990.